“... started work, you have to be elderly and are likely to be increasingly indulgent to your younger self. Freedman seems conscious that she is working from rather a small selection, but says that her theoretical base is ‘broadly conceived and interdisciplinary. My work is heavily indebted to the fields of folklore, ethnomusicology, history, literary ...”

“... ones, this one, now, here.’ This is therapy writing. As Ash admits, ‘Diaries, they’re so self-indulgent ... If you write something down, it goes away.’ In ‘God’s gift’ we don’t know enough to care about the ‘I’ circling round the subject of her lost love or the ‘you’ she’s addressing. Smith makes a virtue of avoiding endings, but ...”

“... or Debussy. In the later works, however technically accomplished they are, he seems increasingly self-conscious in the sense of the epithet that connotes contrivance. One is often moved to be sure; but there is also a sense of being complicit in something not entirely nice. The puzzle about Puccini is why this should be so. Here, perhaps, is a ...”

“... out the window, but all I saw was my own reflection, framed by the night, looking in: my other self staring at me for one and a half hours.’ The chapter ends with sad reflections on what lay ahead for those present. Hugh Fraser ‘died of a broken heart’ when Lady Antonia left him for Harold Pinter. Pat died of cancer. Jebb ‘committed suicide with a ...”

“... and expressive manner than traditional biographical methods allow. Dutch brims with whimsy and self-conscious writerliness. Every other sentence swims in a coulis of the author’s self-regard. ‘Memory. Desire,’ muses ‘Morris’ in his prologue. ‘What is this mysterious yearning of biographer for subject, so akin ...”

“... in the New Statesman praised him for turning ‘his appalled gaze inwards’ – but his self-absorption has some unfortunate consequences.There’s an all too famous passage in the book in which Morrison describes in unashamedly erotic terms undressing his daughter. He goes on to say: ‘a child in my lap, being read to, and I find myself ...”

“... bone to pick with graveyards’ stuff – but the book raises some laughs when the humour is less self-consciously lugubrious. A Touch of Love is harder to defend from a strictly avant-garde point of view. Using a broadly naturalistic idiom, it tells the story of a writer brought low by the strain of living up to his own avant-garde aspirations. The main ...”

“... get to hear is semi-professional melancholians beating on tiny little tin drums, squelching, self-pitying, huffing, puffing and generally wallowing in their own bubble-bath solemnity: the sound of the Fabian Society drinking whisky sours in a hot-tub at a nudist colony. Colin McAdam isn’t from round here: he’s Canadian and lives in Australia. Some ...”

“... things – was so generalised for children of that period as to be unremarkable. The dream of a self-sufficient, ‘de-anglicised’ Irish culture was still alive for many who had grown up around the advent of independence, and, if anything, had only been made more vivid in the years after the Second World War by the attendant notion that an authentic ...”

“... that Chatterton raises in his attack on Walpole, and concentrates instead on pride and poetic self-deification. As an exemplar of the egotistical sublime, Wordsworth’s Chatterton makes Rowley the idol of his pride, the projection of what Hobbes called ‘gloriation of mind’. But even this elevates more than it deserves a literary daring that sprang ...”

“... Or something like it? We are heading into dangerous territory here, as neither Tessa, for all her self-consciousness, nor her creator seems to find anything a bit silly about this clichéd encounter between an Anglo-Saxon woman on holiday and an earthy foreign type. Given Kane’s capacity to micro-analyse her characters’ motivations, this lapse seems ...”

“... to his non-fiction: the loosely structured, discursive essays he favours easily accommodate self-reflection and digression. This means that he has more of an opportunity to write about what really interests him – which, most of the time, is himself. Dyer’s last work of non-fiction was an autobiographical essay entitled Out of Sheer Rage, which is ...”

“... can generate is itself. The gloom never quite lifts. ‘The desire to exploit the possibilities of self-transformation may burn bright in the cosmetic and surgical industries,’ Warner acknowledges towards the end of this demanding, immensely rewarding book, ‘but stories disclose a growing unease with the menace of different selves taking over the real ...”

“... hunt for those you get on with. On what level, though, do I meet their host? In a sense, he’s self-effacing: he speaks second person, forever exclaiming you! Other humans are what he cares for, and nothing could matter more. A pompous nouveau riche; a ragged fisher-boy; that African lad and a jester in blackface; a crazy old lady in the local and a posh ...”

“... it is the most strenuous act of the poetic mind. Hopkins therefore commands himself – in a self-directed imperative, a form not uncommon in poetry – to ‘buckle’ those psychically assimilated qualities to his own ‘stirred’ heart, alchemising them into the subjective world of feeling, and thereby generating the imagination that renders them ...”